Language, Gender, and Sexuality in 2023: Writing from the Thorny Place

Three major strands of research border this review of the field in 2023, a year that was notably exacting for gender and sexual minorities in the legal and sociopolitical arenas. The first is a pronounced interest in the digital—discourses, interactions, and communicative events produced by and about LGBTQ+ communities that demonstrate a sustained investment in analyzing mediatized language practices. The second attends to the statal, comprising work conducted on education, migration, and nationalism in both the Global North and the Global South. Finally, in the third strand, the linguist's gaze is inverted to examine how sociolinguistic and linguistic anthropological research should be critically conducted when gender and sexuality are concerned. The three strands, in tandem, evince the ongoing exigencies that plague gender and sexual minorities in an epoch of ever-increasing queer visibility and the concomitant, unrelenting pushback.